From the award-winning translators of Crime & Punishment Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky Based on a real-life crime which horrified Russia in 1869 Dostoevsky intended his novel to castigate the fanaticism of his country's new revolutionaries particularly those known as Nihilists Blackly funny grotesque & shocking it is a disturbing portrait of five young men saturated in ideology & bent on destruction & a compelling study of terrorism